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Literary Devices

Fresh out of graduate school, I interviewed long ago for a teaching job at a posh girls’ school. The dean explained that while the institution had its traditions, it was very up-to-date. “We have compulsory chapel,” she informed me with a confidential wink. I nodded fatuously, as though chapel were just the thing to instill some spiritual backbone in the era’s wayward youth. “But our curriculum reaches all the way” — she made a theatrical gesture — “from the ‘Odyssey’ to Cynthia O-zee-ack.” I was charmed by this slip, which exposed her attempt to “pass” in my world of literature even as I tried to squeeze into her world of compulsory devotions.

It was to be my only victory that day; I wasn’t offered the position. What strikes me now is that Ozick, one of our shrewdest anatomists of false selves and linguistic subterfuge, might have made a story out of my hapless job search. In an early essay called “The Lesson of the Master,” she described her own coming-of-age as a writer as a tale of conformity and escape, or, to borrow the title of her first book of essays, “art and ardor.” Besotted in her youth with the elegant renunciations of Henry James (on whom she wrote a master’s thesis), she managed to learn, as she tells it, the wrong “lesson,” choosing the marble perfections of Art over the messy entanglements of Life. “All of us will lose our youth,” she observed ruefully, “but not all of us will pin the loss on Henry James.” The four expertly turned stories in “Dictation: A Quartet” extend her revenge, using art to celebrate the arduous ardor of life.

In the title story, the bravura showpiece of the collection, her revenge on the Master is explicit. Henry James and Joseph Conrad, their hands cramped from too much writing, have hired “typewriters,” as typists were called circa 1900. The two great writers and rivals stand for Ozick’s polarity of art and ardor: “James thought Conrad a thicket of unrestrained profusion. Conrad saw James as heartless alabaster.” Some of the resulting comedy is predictable: the fastidious James will be subjected to untidy children and tedious conversation, even as he declaims in his ornate fashion, “May I presume, Mr. Conrad, that you, in the vigor of youth, as it were, are not of a mind to succumb to a mechanical intercessor, as I, heavier with years, perforce have succumbed?”

The secretaries, as Ozick imagines them, are another contrasting pair in the “clash of the Remingtons.” James’s Theodora Bosanquet is mercurial, scheming and predatory, with a taste for younger women. The “fearful dry celibate” Lilian Hallowes is hopelessly in love with Conrad. Both writers, as it happens, are writing stories about doubles, “The Secret Sharer” and “The Jolly Corner.” Bosanquet hatches a devilishly crisscross scheme — a Borgesian perfect crime — for the two secretaries to make their modest but indelible mark on literary eternity. Grandiose? Well, wasn’t Moses himself an amanuensis of sorts, taking “dictation directly from the author”?

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Credit
A. Richard Allen

When Leslie Stephen enters the scene — anachronistically, as Ozick concedes in a witty author’s note (“Never mind, says Fiction; what fun, laughs Transgression; so what? mocks Dream”) — Bosanquet pursues his younger daughter. It is “the late winter of 1910,” around the time that Virginia Woolf (Ginny to her lover) said human character changed. Ozick implies that other things are changing too — the status of the written word, for example, in an age of mechanical reproduction. Conrad tries to stave off the inevitable: “He had his seaman’s good right hand, and the firm mast of his pen, and the blessed ocean of paper, as white as a sail and as relentless as the wind.”

Ozick’s yin-yang of art and ardor is given a more familiar twist in “Actors.” Matt Sorley, born Mose Sadacca, is an aging thespian in the Jamesian mode. “His stage name had a vaguely Irish sound, but his origins were Sephardic.” A master of “nuance, tendril, shadow, intimation,” he “delivered hints and shadings to the proscenium,” which was “holy ground.” There’s no market for his subtle talents, however, and his wife — a composer of crossword puzzles whose job “kept her confined and furious” and whose motto is “grid and bear it” — is growing impatient with his haughty idleness.

When a rising young director offers Matt a role — “something to do with Lear” — he has little choice but to take it. Yet the director’s real aim, “to restore the old lost art of melodrama,” challenges everything Matt has achieved in his career. The director wants to bring back the ardor of the old Yiddish theater: “Weeping on the stage, weeping in all the rows.” As Matt goes deeper into the role, and into his own life of role-playing, it turns out that he has his own secret sharer, who haunts the rehearsals and interrupts opening night, to hilarious effect.

“At Fumicaro” is a less persuasive performance. Frank Castle, a Roman Catholic journalist from New York attending a conference on the future of the church in Fascist Italy, is another of Ozick’s apostles of purity: “His mind was a secret cave, immaculately swept and spare.” But the world he enters at the Villa Garibaldi on Lake Como is hardly “immaculately swept.” Like Mann’s Aschenbach, he is ambushed by life: he finds the chambermaid, Viviana — like life itself, “ardor glowed in her” — on her knees in his bathroom, not praying but retching into the toilet. “In four days,” Ozick tells us right off, “she would be his wife.” The suspension of disbelief required here — the abrupt fall of Frank Castle; the sketchy historical setting with “the pinkish palace of Il Duce” across the lake; poor abject Viviana forced to stand for “the great protoplasmic heave of human continuity” — is a bit extreme for the modest love story at its core.

In “What Happened to the Baby?” Ozick returns to form, and to the terrain of one of her best-known stories, “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Uncle Simon (the story is told from his niece’s point of view) is the creator of “GNU, the future language of all mankind.” Scornful of Esperanto and its creator, the “false messiah” Dr. Zamenhof, Simon wants to push his own universal language “beyond European roots.” He has “traveled all over the world, picking up roots and discarding the less common vowels.”

He has also picked up girls, as his niece discovers. Gradually, she also learns the real reason for Simon’s lifelong quarrel with Esperanto, and in doing so she comes to a realization about what unites us all as language-bearers. “Lie, illusion, deception,” she asks herself — was that “truly, the universal language we all speak?” She might have given this all-encompassing language a different, more Jamesian name. Call it the “art of fiction,” in which Cynthia Ozick, in “Dictation: A Quartet,” reveals herself a master.

DICTATION

A Quartet.

By Cynthia Ozick.

179 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.

Christopher Benfey is Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His latest book, “A Summer of Hummingbirds,” about writers and artists in Gilded Age America, has just been published.

A version of this review appears in print on , on page BR11 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Literary Devices. Today's Paper|Subscribe